Adolf Hitler
Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was one of the most powerful and infamous dictators of the 20th century. After World War I, he rose to power in the National Socialist German Workers Party, taking control of the German government in 1933. His establishment of concentration camps to inter Jews and other groups he believed to be a threat to Aryan supremacy resulted in the death of more than 6 million people in the Holocaust. His attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II, and by 1941 Germany occupied much of Europe and North Africa. The tide of the war turned following an invasion of Russian and the U.S. entry into battle, and Hitler killed himself shortly before Germany’s defeat. Biography Baptized a Catholic, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was born on April 20, 1889, in the Upper Austrian border town Braunau am Inn, located approximately 65 miles east of Munich and nearly 30 miles north of Salzburg. His father, Alois Hitler (1837–1903), was a mid-level customs official. Born out of wedlock to Maria Anna Schickelgruber in 1837, Alois Schickelgruber changed his name in 1876 to Hitler, the Christian name of the man who married his mother five years after his birth. Alois Hitler's illegitimacy would cause speculation as early as the 1920s—and still present in popular culture today—that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Credible evidence to support the notion of Hitler's Jewish descent has never turned up. The two most likely candidates to have been Hitler's grandfather are the man who married his grandmother and that man's brother. In 1898, the Hitler family moved to Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Seeking a career in the visual arts, Hitler fought bitterly with his father, who wanted him to enter the Habsburg civil service. After his father's death, Hitler eventually persuaded his mother, Klara Hitler, née Pölzl, to permit him to pursue his dream to become an artist. As she lay dying of breast cancer in the autumn of 1907, Hitler took the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of the Arts and failed to gain acceptance. In early 1908, some weeks after Klara's death in December 1907, Hitler moved to Vienna, ostensibly in the hope of renewing efforts to win acceptance in the Academy of Arts. Hitler lived in Vienna between February 1908 and May 1913. He had grown up in a middle-class family, with relatively few contacts with Jewish people, in a region of the Habsburg state in which many German nationalists had been disappointed that the German Empire founded in 1871 had not included the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. Yet the legacy of the Vienna years is not as clear as Hitler depicted it in his political autobiography. His impoverishment and residence in homeless shelters began only a year after his arrival and after he had frittered away a generous inheritance left by his parents and rejected all arguments of surviving relatives and family friends that he embark upon a career in the civil service. By the end of 1909, Hitler knew real poverty as his sources of income dried up. That winter, however, helped briefly by a last gift from his aunt, he began to paint watercolor scenes of Vienna for a business partner and made enough to live on until he departed for Munich in 1913. It is likely that Hitler experienced and possible that he shared the general antisemitism common among middle-class German nationalists. Nevertheless, he had personal and business relationships with Jews in Vienna and was, at times, dependent in part on Jews for his living. This may have been a cause for discretion about his actual feelings about Jews. It was not until after World War I that Hitler can be demonstrated to have adopted an “antisemitic” ideology. Hitler was genuinely influenced in Vienna by two political movements. The first was the German racist nationalism propagated by the Upper Austrian Pan-German politician Georg von Schönerer. The second key influence was that of Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to his death in 1910. Still in power when Hitler arrived in Vienna, Lueger promoted an antisemitism that was more practical and organizational than ideological. Nevertheless, it reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes and cast Jews as enemies of the German middle and lower classes. Finally, unlike Schönerer, who was always more comfortable with the elitist nationalism of the student fraternities, Lueger was comfortable with big city crowds and knew how to channel their protest into political gain. Hitler drew his ideology in large part from Schönerer, but his strategy and tactics from Lueger. To avoid being arrested for evading military service in Austria-Hungary, Adolf Hitler left Vienna for Munich in May 1913 but was forced to return–then he failed the physical. He volunteered for the Bavarian army the following year and served during all of World War I on the Western Front. His experiences in the fighting affected his thinking about war thereafter. After World War I, Hitler came to control the National Socialist German Workers Party, which he hoped to lead to power in Germany. When a coup attempt in 1923 failed, he turned, after release from jail, to the buildup of the party to seize power by means that were at least outwardly legal. He hoped to carry out a program calling for the restructuring of Germany on a racist basis so that it could win a series of wars to expand the German people’s living space until they dominated and exclusively inhabited the globe. He believed that Germany should fight wars for vast tracts of land to enable its people to settle on them, raising large families that would replace casualties and provide soldiers for the next war of expansion. The first would be a small and easy war against Czechoslovakia, to be followed by the really difficult one against France and Britain. A third war would follow against the Soviet Union, which he assumed would be simple and quick and would provide raw materials, especially oil, for the fourth war against the United States. That war would be simple once Germany had the long-range planes and superbattleships to fight a power thought inherently weak but far distant and possessing a large navy. Once Hitler had come to power in 1933, German military preparations were made for these wars. The emphasis in the short term was on weapons for the war against the western powers, and for the long term, on the weapons for war against the United States. In 1938 Hitler drew back from war over Czechoslovakia at the last minute but came to look upon agreeing to a peaceful settlement at Munich as his worst mistake. When he turned to the war against France and Britain, he could not persuade Poland to subordinate itself to Germany to ensure a quiet situation in the east; hence, he decided to destroy that country before heading west. He was determined to have war and initiated it on September 1, 1939. To facilitate the quick conquest of Poland and break any blockade, he aligned Germany with the Soviet Union, assuming that concessions made to that country would be easily reclaimed when Germany turned east. Hitler had originally hoped to attack in the west in the late fall of 1939, but bad weather–which would have hindered full use of the air force–and differences among the military led to postponement until the spring of 1940. During that interval, Hitler made two major decisions. Urged on by Admiral Erich Raeder, he decided to seize Norway to facilitate the navy’s access to the North Atlantic and did so in April 1940. Urged by General Erich von Manstein, he shifted the primary focus of attack in the west from the northern to the southern part of the force that was to invade the Low Countries. They might then cut off Allied units coming to aid the Belgians and the Dutch. The new strategy at first appeared to work when the Germans in a few days broke through the French defenses and, within ten days, reached the Channel coast behind the Allied forces. Ordering their air force to destroy the cut-off Allied units, the Germans first wanted to turn south to prevent the buildup of a new defensive line, a decision on which the German commander, Gerd von Rundstedt, and Hitler agreed. As it became clear that many Allied soldiers might escape, the direction of the armor was reversed again, but too late to halt the evacuation of much of the British Expeditionary Force and many French soldiers. The thrust southward in early June 1940 brought a swift collapse of remaining French resistance, and this complete victory gave Hitler an aura of triumph, which assured him the enthusiastic support of almost all of Germany’s military leaders, especially as he systematically tied them to himself by generous promotions and a system of mass bribery. Because it looked as if this war was over, Hitler and the military began planning for the wars against the United States and against the Soviet Union. On July 11, the resumption of construction of the navy to defeat the United States was ordered; by July 31, after first hoping to invade the Soviet Union in the fall of 1940, Hitler, on the advice of his military staff, decided to attack in the east in the late spring of 1941. As Britain refused to accept defeat, Hitler planned to combine three measures to knock it out of the war: the German air force would destroy the country’s capacity to defend itself; there would be an invasion if Britain did not surrender; and the expected quick defeat of the Soviet Union would remove that country as a possible source of aid for Britain and, by ending any danger to Japan’s rear, encourage that power to move in the Pacific and tie up the United States. Hitler wanted Japan to join in the war with Britain and promised to join Japan in war with the United States if that was thought necessary by Tokyo, assuming that this would be the other way for Germany to acquire the navy for war with the United States. A short campaign in the Balkans was to secure what he believed might be a vulnerable southern flank; the last step in this, the airborne seizure of Crete, proved so costly that the Germans attempted no major airborne operation thereafter. The German invasion of the Soviet Union, begun on June 22, 1941, seemed at first to work as planned but quickly ran into trouble. The initial blows, which were supposed to bring the Soviet Union crashing down in a few weeks, did not have that effect. Thereafter, the question always was which sector to attack and whether to retreat. In this, Hitler was at times at odds with some generals, but others always took his position. As the war turned increasingly against Germany, disagreements became more frequent. Hitler still expected to win while some generals were trying to find a less messy way of losing. None advised against going to war with the United States. For the 1942 offensive in the east, Hitler and his military leaders agreed on striking in the south; this project ended in disaster at Stalingrad. A new major offensive in 1943 not only ended in defeat at Kursk but also was followed by the first successful Red Army summer offensive. When retreats were advocated, Hitler was always concerned about the loss of mateacuteriel that could not be hauled back, about the need to reconquer whatever had been given up, and about shorter lines, which released Red Army units for new offensives. Some generals, Erwin Rommel and Walther Model, for example, occasionally acted without or against orders to pull back and were not punished. Others were sent home to collect their monthly bribes in retirement. As Hitler saw increasing danger from the western Allies, he relied more on Admiral [D[odienitz]] to hold them off by submarine warfare. When that effort was blunted in 1943, he both supported the building of new types of submarines and geared strategy on the northern portion of the Eastern Front to protection of the Baltic area, where new submarines and crews could be run in. Enormous resources were also allocated to new weapons designed to destroy London. It was Hitler’s hope that the Germans could drive any Allied troops who landed in the west into the sea and then move substantial forces east in the interval before any second invasion. When this plan failed, Hitler turned to holding all ports as long as possible, to hamper Allied supply lines and to prepare for a counterstroke that would defeat the western Allies. This counterstroke, the Battle of the Bulge, would then provide the opportunity to move forces east after all. As the Allies closed in on Germany, Hitler increasingly hoped for a split in the alliance he had forged against himself. He believed Germany had lost World War I because of the collapse of the home front and therefore assumed that establishment of a dictatorship and the systematic killing of all Jews would guarantee victory this time. When the end was near, he married his mistress and then committed suicide with her. Category:Characters Category:Dictators